BlackObs

The OP appears to be very well-read and educated ("over wordy" to the... less literate among us), and ironically, Fritz, your ire differs from my own only in topic; in my case, it was the steaming pile of excrement that is the Verisign system that Stardock uses to authenticate online payments. I took my exasperation to Stardock directly, via an e-mail to their customer service. Like you, Fritz, I sometimes find myself to be... overly eloquent when I'm pissed off, and my e-mail was thu

Alfb: I'm in Canada (Northern Ontario, more specifically), which rules out Buy.com and Circuit City. I did try Amazon Canada, but they've been out of stock forever, and we don't have much else in the way of online stores up here (at least ones that stock PC games). Would've hit up a Future Shop/Best Buy whenever I went to Ottawa or Toronto, though.

I've been reading Journal postings ever since being pointed here by a fellow Arsian (www.arstechnica.com) who was waiting for the game. I'm not heavily into 4X games, but this one seemed really interesting. Unfortunately, actually buying the game turned out to be nigh-on impossible. I couldn't buy direct, since Stardock's VeriSign system demands exactly-perfect address information, and nothing I gave it made it happy (including exactly what the CC comp